Multi-touch devices, which are commonly available in connection with digital devices, can provide richer user input to interactive systems compared to single-point input devices, such as a mouse or a pen. Multi-touch inputs can be gestures, such as a tap, a press, or a swipe, or an ordered sequence of gestures that can control user interface (UI) elements or directly manipulate data. Most existing user interfaces use only two contact points, which have simpler and less ambiguous contact status. Multi-touch devices can detect the user's intended operations based on the number of finger contact points, the relative location of the finger contact points and the motion (e.g. tapping, pressing or swiping). These user interfaces do not rely on distinguishing which hand or fingers are in contact with the touch device.
Finger identification alone is not new. The ability to distinguish which hand or finger is contacting the touch device provides useful additional information. Such information can allow direct mapping between a user's fingers and interface operations. It also becomes possible to assign different interface operations to gestures involving different combinations of hands and fingers. Some existing devices can detect different fingers through capacitive sensing or vision based systems; however, these devices require special hardware and detect different touch-related information, such as the contact area, touch pressure, presence of floating fingers above the multi-touch surface, and fingerpoint, leading to difficulty designing general, customizable and platform-independent multi-touch user interfaces. No existing techniques can distinguish different hands and fingers directly from only the positions of the contact points on the touch input device.
The above-described deficiencies of conventional multi-touch techniques are merely intended to provide an overview of some of problems of current technology, and are not intended to be exhaustive. Other problems with the state of the art and corresponding benefits of some of the various non-limiting embodiments described herein may become further apparent upon review of the following detailed description.